


A Lack of Colour

by chucksauce



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Drabble, M/M, Soul Mates AU, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:14:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1618883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chucksauce/pseuds/chucksauce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is six years, five months, and four days old when he loses colours.</p><p>It isn’t until years later, after the hell of school and uni have been left behind for the endless tedium of adulthood, that Sherlock meets John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lack of Colour

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://chucksauce.tumblr.com/post/84496121895/johnlock-ficlet-a-lack-of-colour).

Sherlock is six years, five months, and four days old when he loses colours.

It happens on the playground, when he stumbles upon a group of boys who have done what little boys sometimes do—they have discovered an injured bird, and in their curiosity, have become cruel tormentors.

Sherlock can see by the bird’s movements, the frantic flap of flightless wings and scrabble of useless talons, just how terrified and pained it is as they prod and manipulate it. And when one of them drops the rock, and the bird goes still, it is no longer a bluejay on hard brown earth, but a greywashed collection of feather and tissue. The tiny trickle of black against the ashen ground shines more than its eyes.

Sherlock, of course, does not know what has happened, why his world suddenly flickers from a technicolour riot into a bewildering landscape of greys, white on black. He runs away before the boys can see that he has observed their misdeeds, knowing that he, too, is a target for their unthinking violence.

What he learns later, from Mycroft, is that all children experience this at some point, that moment when innocence is shattered; hope and magic are replaced with a monochromatic reality stark in its rendering. Mycroft is not so poetic, however, and merely smiles his cold, reptilian smile, as he says, “Welcome to the real world, little brother.”

Sherlock is certain Mycroft has seen the world in black and white for longer than Sherlock’s been alive, but would never ask Mycroft to tell him that story.

 

 

It isn’t until years later, after the hell of school and uni have been left behind for the endless tedium of adulthood, that Sherlock meets John Watson.

By the time he reaches his thirties, he has experienced a variety of the cruelties offered by the world: the loss of loved ones as his grandmother—the only person who told him the secret to finding colours again—passes, the deep weals of rejection and the sharp stab of humiliation from his peers. By the time he reaches his thirties, he has built his walls high and thick in order to keep the world and its two-toned pain away.

The morning in question, he is set up at the morgue of St. Bart’s, recording the various effects of posthumous bruising. He slams the riding crop down hard against the unfeeling flesh of the corpse Molly has provided, and when his colorblindness hinders his ability to accurately record the results, he scowls loudly and displaces his frustrations with the crop.

He pauses a moment, catching his breath, staring at the unfortunate John Doe on the slab, when two things happen simultaneously: the door to the morgue quietly slides open, a voice says, “It’s a lot different than it was in my day,” and a riot of cream and blue-black and violet, of sickly yellow-green and florid red explode across the back of the corpse, garish and grotesque.

The suddenness, the violence of this detonation, sends him reeling, twists his stomach hard as he turns to inspect the newcomer.

The man is compact, but his skin—his skin is  _tanned_ , olive fading to London’s wintry pallor. Sherlock doesn’t know if there are adequate words in the whole of the English language to name this man’s hair, at once blonde and brown and laced with the first streaks of silver. His eyes are a deep, navy blue, beset with both laugh-lines and frown-lines, a thousand subtle shades he hasn’t seen on flesh since he was six years old.

Immediately he knows. He knows deep down in the most secret, walled-off chambers of his figurative heart, that his grandmother was right, after all.

 _"It will come when you least expect it, Sherlock,"_  she had whispered to him more times than he could recount.  _"But it will happen when your heart’s the most ready for it. And then you’ll find the joy in the world again. You’ll find the beauty worth sticking around to discover."_

He can feel those barriers crashing down within him, crumbling like plaster, eroded in a current of  _I found him, he’s the one, oh lord this is what she meant_  that threatens to sweep him along entirely in its undertow.

He doesn’t know if it’s some euphoric relief, or the way his stomach clenches and his head pounds with the visual overload, but tears well up in his eyes. He only barely blinks them away before the man’s gaze snares him.

The man, of course, looks as stunned as Sherlock feels, but he recovers quickly and offers a terse chuckle to Mike, who watches them both with benign amusement. Sherlock wonders for half a second if Mike knows what he is seeing, but the question is lost in his mind against the cacophony of royal blue and azure-tinged white of the man’s checked shirt, the rich olive-green of the jacket some imbecile historically dubbed “drab.”

It is only when Mike offers Sherlock a knowing smile and withdraws from the room, that the man speaks. His voice is quiet and warm, smoothed like a sun-baked river stone, as he says, “Well, now. Not what I was expecting of a Tuesday afternoon.”

For his part, Sherlock can’t decide if he wants to laugh or vomit, the upheaval of ecstatic brain chemicals warring with the visceral gut-punch of taking in too much stimulus at once. Instead, he hears himself say, “I play violin, and sometimes I don’t speak for days at a time. I love people-watching, but can’t stand small-talk. I haven’t seen a rainbow since the day after my fifth birthday, but I want to spend the rest of my life cataloging the variations of brown hidden on your left temple. Would that be a problem?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I really enjoy making friends with strangers on the internet. Come by and say hi!
> 
>   * [**My Fandom Tumblr**](http://chucksauce.tumblr.com) for all manner of crying about fictional characters and laughing at shitposts
>   * **[My Fic Rec Blog](http://spoilersauce.tumblr.com)** , if you're into multifandom recs.
>   * **[Under-London](http://under-london.com/)** , the original serialized novel I'm working on for cheap-as-free!
>   * **[My Twitter](http://twitter.com/chucksauce221)** , where I basically live when I'm not writing...
> 



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